Gothic Language Projects

A page with all the Gothic language-related stuff I’ve done.

Feel free to contact me about anything; feedback greatly appreciated!

About Me

I’ve always been somewhat fascinated by the Gothic language for some reason, and recently (2025) found interest in it again due to realising that even after Arianism, it, a Germanic language, was seemingly used liturgically to some extent for centuries under Eastern Orthodox Christianity (of which I’m an inquirer). Though due to its Arian connotations, I’ve translated the Nicene Creed and want to translate various other liturgical texts, prayers and lives of the saints into the Gothic language, having the language “baptised into Christ”. I’m also into conlanging, calligraphy, software development, writing systems (how I found the Gothic language originally) and dozenal. And I’m bilingual in English and German.

My Conventions

Pronunciation

I try to pronounce Gothic as described on the Gothic Language Wikipedia page, though loosely with these extra rules:

• Long ai and au as /ai/ and /au/ generally when in a stressed position and not preceding a vowel, and /ɛː/ and /ɔː/ otherwise.
• The genitive plural -e ending as /iː/. Gustav Must posits that the plural genitive -e was actually pronounced /iː/, as written on the Ring of Pietroassa, but was conventionally written -e by Wulfila to avoid confusion with the frequent relative particle ei and its enclitic use -ei, e.g. izei vs ize.

Transcription

In my Latin alphabet transcriptions, for native Gothic words, ai and au without diacritics are pronounced short (/ɛ/ and /ɔ/) before h, ƕ and r, and otherwise long (/ɛː/ and /ɔː/, or /ai/ and /au/). The diacritics then indicate the exceptional cases, aí and aú are short, and ái and áu are long. For non-native words, ai and au are always short unless marked otherwise. This way, it’s easier to spot and learn the exceptional cases when reading only in the Gothic alphabet. I also try to mark all cases of long a and u as ā and ū. And I don’t add diaereses on i at the start of words as they were there in the manuscripts to help read Gothic when it was written without spaces … and they’re a pain to write all the time. I still add them stylistically, and within words to mark the start of a syllable, e.g. innïddja.

Tools

• Transliterator
• WulfilaVerse – A Userscript which adds Wulfila.be verse links to Bible Hub and Bible Gateway.

Sites

• Widr in Gutrazdai – The weather in Gothic
• Kalaindāri in Gutrazdai – A calendar in Gothic

Pages

• A Guide to Gothic Alliterative Verse
• Prayers in Gothic

Posts

• Gothic Numerals over 999
• CSS Counter Style with Gothic Numerals

Translations

On the following pages, click on the lines to see translations and notes, and to see the Gothic text in the Latin script, click the “L” button in the top right corner.

Fonts

• Noto Serif Gothic (v1.0) – Font with uppercase and lowercase Gothic letters. The letters I created from the various letters in the original Noto Serif font, largely from Latin and Cyrillic letters. Licensed under SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1.

Links

Various other Gothic-related things, not by me, but useful and interesting.